The Voice on the Radio

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “Call if you need me,” said her friend.

  “Let’s hope I won’t need rescue twice in one day.” Janie launched herself toward her own front door.

  “Jennie Spring!” the reporter cried. “Good to see you again! It’s been six months since—”

  Janie neither looked at him nor spoke. She knew by now that a silent subject did not make good copy.

  The door opened from the inside, and together Janie and her mother shut it against the journalist.

  Janie rubbed her mother’s cold hands between hers. Her mother had gotten so thin in the last year. Her fingers were bony and old. “What happened?” said Janie.

  “They think their readers deserve an update.”

  Everybody deserves something, thought Janie. Sarah-Charlotte deserves details, Ty deserves photographs, the readers deserve a piece of my mother.

  She hated them.

  Janie made a pot of coffee. Coffee relaxed her mother, but it put Janie on the ceiling. She needed to be the one on the ground. So much for telling Mommy about Lipstick Day and Tyler’s yearbook plans.

  When Daddy got home from work and heard they’d had a reporter around, he just made it worse. Instead of brushing it aside, he actually confided, “I’ve been thinking about Hannah lately.”

  They never admitted this: that Hannah was real, a real daughter, and must be thought of.

  Janie had a sudden, terrible vision of her parents with a carrying case full of Hannahs under their bed. But they couldn’t take Hannah out, like a Barbie, and dress her, and fix her hair, and fix her life.

  “I was on the Internet the other night,” said her father. His fingertips touched his wife’s, and Janie saw that her mother’s ring finger had gotten so thin that she’d wrapped tape around her wedding band to keep it from falling off. “On the Internet, you’re connected to a million strangers. Names without faces. Hidden people.”

  In the Johnson family code, this meant Hannah.

  “Do you think she’s out there?” whispered Janie’s mother, shivering not just with fear, but also with hope. Hannah was a lost daughter. Dangerous—but still, and forevermore, a daughter.

  What would we hope for, if we hoped for Hannah? thought Janie. It’s too late for the good career, or the fine husband, or the healthy children.

  I am their only hope, she thought. I am all that stands between them and hell.

  It was Janie who insisted on dinner; Janie who assigned easy little tasks; Janie who asked casually if everybody was taking their heart medicine.

  Her mother normalized. “Everybody? Well, I am, and your father is, but luckily you don’t need heart medicine.”

  Oh, but I do, thought Janie. I do. And so does the world.

  “Hi, you’ve reached WSCK!” said Reeve into the telephone. “We’re Here, We’re Yours, We’re Sick! How can I help you?”

  “Hi, Reeve. Are you going to do a janie tonight?” The caller had recognized Reeve’s voice.

  Awesome! thought Reeve. For the next call, he did a little test. “Hi, you’ve reached WSCK! We’re Here, We’re Yours, We’re Sick! This is Burt Smith, how can I help you?”

  “Hi, Reeve. Burt Smith is a dumb name, don’t use it. Reeve is much sexier. Listen, I just have one question. I don’t understand how her kidnap parents are still the good guys.”

  The phone was becoming nearly as much fun as the mike.

  He felt like recording these calls, proof that he meant something in this world.

  Call-ins were recorded only if the deejay intended to play them on the air, and only Derek ever did that. Derek loved stupid people. Stupid people would telephone the college radio station expecting answers to college questions. “Do exams really begin Tuesday morning?”

  Derek loved these. “Omigod!” he would shriek. “Exams are over! You weren’t there? Oh, no, your semester means nothing now. How are you going to tell your parents you just threw away twelve thousand dollars?”

  Therefore Derek tended to tape callers, in case there was a humiliating exchange he could play later. Everybody else just kept the log so that they could prove they had listeners. Reeve entered another janie.

  What a difference a capital letter made. A janie was airtime. Drama. No person involved.

  Reeve listened to Derek Himself’s spinning intro, the elongated vowels—“what yooooouuuu’ve been waiting for!”—and the exclamation points in Derek’s voice.

  For me, he thought. For my voice. My story.

  Derek slid out of the way, and Reeve took over. He fondled the fat sides of the mike.

  That microphone gave him the most amazing freedom. Reeve could say anything.

  And did.

  * * *

  Hannah.

  She was pretty in a limp sort of way.

  Like a used rag doll. Nobody is ever best friends with that kind. They’re on the fringes. Doomed.

  Hannah joined a cult, dropped out of regular life, probably thought she was one of the good guys, because her cult said that God was on their side.

  Years after she left her nice home and her nice parents, Hannah kidnapped a little girl named Jennie Spring.

  Why? Nobody knows. Maybe she just wanted company. A smiling face in the passenger seat. Somebody to have ice cream with. Maybe it sort of happened by itself and she didn’t know what to do afterward. Or maybe she wanted that poor family to suffer. To worry, year after year: Is our little girl in pain? Is she cold? Is she scared? Is she bleeding? Is she alive?

  Hannah took that little girl home to her own mom and dad, and she said, This is my baby. Your grandchild. You’ll be better parents than I am, so bye! Enjoy her! And Hannah left.

  She went back to her cult. Maybe. Nobody knows. Anyway, she disappeared forever, leaving only one instruction. “Enjoy her.” And they did. Oh, how they enjoyed her! Their little girl—they thought her name was Janie, not Jennie—was the light of their lives. When they were parents to Hannah, they must have made some really, really big mistake, though they never figured out what the mistake was, or when they made it. But you’ve got to admit, good parents don’t have daughters who join cults and abandon their babies. But now they could get it right. This time around, they’d be perfect parents. And Janie: It was her job to be the perfect daughter.

  * * *

  Janie took out her Barbies.

  She no longer had the large accessories: cars, beauty parlor, furniture, condo—these were long gone to fund-raiser tag sales.

  She still had the clothing.

  She sat on her bed and sorted wardrobes by career. Barbies liked to be onstage, so there were lots of choices: singer, ballerina or model. Barbies liked the professions, so they could be doctor, astronaut or soldier. And they loved sports, so they were always ready to go horseback riding, or teach swimming, or just get a tan.

  The Barbies had had more careers in that suitcase than Janie had ever daydreamed of for herself.

  In fact, trapped in yearbook visions, forced to think of graduation and college, Janie realized that she had never had any plans except to stay sane and keep the number of parents in her life as low as possible.

  And marriage.

  She wanted to be married the way both her Johnson and her Spring parents were married: for better or for worse, so that when the worst came, you held on to each other, until better returned.

  Just because Reeve hasn’t checked his e-mail, hasn’t called, hasn’t written, doesn’t mean the world is over, she told herself.

  Two years.

  Two years before she could join Reeve at college.

  Once again Reeve had been at WSCK so many hours that the cafeteria was closed by the time he remembered dinner. He was forced to eat from a row of vending machines that lined the student center.

  “Hey, aren’t you the guy on Sick?” said a girl getting Fritos.

  Reeve grinned and nodded. He loved being noticed.

  “I’m Kerry.” She offered him some of her Fritos. “You do the janie thing! I haven’t missed a single janie
,” said Kerry, like a collector.

  What a trip! Back home, recognition and admiration had gone to his older brother and sisters. No wonder they enjoyed life so much.

  “I liked that part where Janie had such bad nightmares she had to barricade herself in with pillows to keep the demons from attacking her spine or her toes while she slept,” said Kerry. “I had to do that when I was little.”

  Reeve felt a funny dryness in his mouth, as if he had seen a bear on the path. I told about that? Her parents don’t know about that. Now Boston knows.

  “My boyfriend Matthew is in love with Janie. He says he’d know her the minute he saw her, with that red hair swirled around her head.”

  It had not occurred to Reeve that he had described Janie so well that strangers could recognize her. He wanted an audience, but at the same time, he didn’t want the audience to be real.

  It doesn’t matter, Reeve said to himself. Janie’ll never hear my broadcasts. Nobody outside of Hills College listens to WSCK. I bet there are fifty stations around Boston and everybody is listening to them.

  Statistics of probability always made Reeve feel better.

  He walked down the street to his dorm. Hills College had no grass, no quadrangles; it simply filled several Boston blocks. Reeve had not explored Boston the way the other freshmen had. They went shopping on Newbury Street, or skated on Rollerblades down Commonwealth, or headed out Mass Av to Cambridge. He knew enough not to pronounce Av Avenue, but he had not actually taken the road himself. WSCK had absorbed him.

  He picked his way around torn-up pavement and huge yellow equipment in front of his dorm. You couldn’t call it a construction site; nobody ever seemed to work here. It was more like a parking lot for bulldozers.

  He skipped the dorm elevator and took four flights of stairs two steps at a time. Speed made Reeve feel better, too.

  Three boys were getting off the elevator near his room. Nobody Reeve knew. Computer geeks. You were supposed to refer to your fellow students as men and women, but sometimes the words didn’t fit. These were boys.

  “Hi,” said one boy timidly. “We’re Visionary Assassins.”

  “You are?” said Reeve. This trio would have trouble looking both ways before they crossed a street, never mind being assassins.

  “We’re here to thank you.” They were visibly delighted to meet him. He was Somebody. “You play us whenever you’re on. We’re your signature. Everybody’s talking about the janies now, and they think of us at the same time. We just got our first paid gig because of you.”

  His radio show worked. It meant something!

  “Can you announce on the next janie that we’re going to be playing Saturday at Peaches n Crude?” they said anxiously. “We’d love it if you’d come, Reeve.”

  Reeve did not want them to see how happy he was. Famous people were cool. So he didn’t leap into the air and smash through the ceiling panels with his fist. He said, “I might.” He gave a casual good-night salute and opened his door.

  Cordell now had a steady girlfriend, and he had given Pammy a key to their room. Reeve was just as apt to find Pammy living there as Cordell. He was still getting used to girls in various stages of undress sharing his actual bedroom. College was definitely different from home.

  Pammy draped herself around Reeve, who peeled her off like a sweater and set her aside.

  “We were just talking about you,” said Pammy. “What was in the box in the attic? You never went back to that.”

  How strange to be quoted.

  “Come on, Reevey, tell.”

  “If you call me Reevey,” said Reeve, “I’m going to put a hand grenade in your cereal.”

  “But what was in the box?” asked Cordell. “I’m your roomie. You have to tell me. College rule.”

  Reeve had a vision of his audience. The unwashed Cordells and the worthless Pammys. The dry, unpleasant taste filled his mouth.

  “It would be easier to keep track of the story if you’d use last names,” said Cordell.

  Last names Reeve omitted because that way it wasn’t the Johnsons and the Springs; it was generic; it could be any kidnap family in this situation.

  Not that there was any other family in this situation.

  Reeve busied himself with their shared computer. Maybe he had mail. He never went past the dorm letter boxes without checking for a written letter, but he preferred e-mail. Written letters were exhausting. They required written answers. Reeve hated handwriting. Steering that little stick with the ink at the bottom of it was a chore he had never conquered. When he had to handwrite, the words got cramped into the upper corners of the page, and his fingers hurt, and his brain went dead.

  At the computer, there was no long, blank page like an accusation from a teacher that he hadn’t finished the assignment.

  Another cool thing about e-mail was that for some reason spelling didn’t matter, and if you were a terrible typist, that didn’t matter either; you didn’t have to do it over. The first time was always good enough.

  If I go into radio, thought Reeve, I can skip handwriting. My life will be wired.

  YOU HAVE MAIL, said the cute little blinking postman icon.

  Reeve smiled idiotically, the way people do when someone writes to them, personally. The letter was from Janie.

  Reeve, I’ve had the worst day. Of course I did something stupid and made it worse. Reeve, I need you. Can I come up and visit you? Mommy and Daddy would never let me stay overnight, but I could stay all day. I could go to class with you, I wouldn’t get in your way. I’d take the train that arrives in Boston at 9:22 a.m. How’s Friday?

  Loooooooovvvvvvve Janie

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  Reeve’s hair prickled. He hated that feeling, as if his hair had come alive, or he had lice. Janie here? On campus? It was the hair that would give it away, just as that hair had been proof from the beginning. He remembered the spread of that coppery-red mass; the right he had, as boyfriend, to play with it, and kiss the face hidden beneath it.

  Reeve imagined himself and Janie bumping into Vinnie. Or Derek Himself. Pammy or Cordell. Kerry’s boyfriend Matthew. They’d know in a heartbeat who she had to be.

  Reeve had known he shouldn’t be doing this, but it was such fun that he had pretended he didn’t know.

  He had been doing the janies for a month now. They were the major part of his life. Reeve so routinely cut classes that he hardly thought of himself as having any.

  How was he to handle a college visit? He was hardly even a college student.

  If I don’t take her to the student center, he thought, and I don’t take her to my dorm, which I’ll say is all grungy disgusting guys, which is true, and I tell her I’ve got to get off campus, being cooped up here is making me insane, and think how much there is to see and do in Boston…we could go straight from the train to Quincy Market, Janie loves shopping. Take her to some elegant restaurant like Legal Seafoods. Dinner at that kind of restaurant takes hours, no time to visit the campus, got to rush to Back Bay Station.

  He clicked his mail closed. It vanished in a screen sort of way, sucking itself backward into the hardware.

  Janie lay on her bed, flipping through TV stations with her remote. Talk show after talk show. Why did the rest of world love witnesses? How could they hop onto TV and blurt out their entire lives without a twitch? To ten million witnesses?

  The phone rang.

  “Hello,” she said. She wanted Reeve the way she wanted oxygen. She pressed Mute on her remote. The talk show hostess struck silent, dramatic poses and thrust the mike into the faces of eager audience members. You could tell the audience was after blood.

  “Hey, Janie,” said Reeve. “What made the day so awful? Tell me about it.”

  “Oh, Reeve! I’m so glad you called. I was afraid you wouldn’t check your e-mail. Sarah-Charlotte is smarter than I am, is what happened.” If only she could picture him now—where he was, how the room was shaped, what he sat on, the color of the phone, what
he was wearing.

  She missed all of him, all ways. Talk for hours, she thought, tell me everything, blot away today.

  “This is about Sarah-Charlotte’s IQ? Who cares?” said Reeve.

  “No, it’s about fight or flight. Sarah-Charlotte knew all along and I still haven’t figured it out.”

  “Talking to you always starts in the middle,” said Reeve.

  “I know, and the best thing about you is, you always catch up.” Janie told him about Lipstick Day, which he loved.

  “That’s great! We didn’t do that when I was in school. Whose idea was that?” said Reeve.

  “Sarah-Charlotte’s. You know her. People obey her. So even with this weird idea that I didn’t think a single person would participate in, five hundred people did.”

  “I wish I’d seen you. Anybody take photographs?”

  “Oh, Reeve! That’s the point! I tried to kill the kid who tried to take my picture!” She told him about the scene in the gym.

  The silent TV disrupted her thoughts, so she clicked it off, getting rid of the confessing guest and the avid audience. Even without sound, it was clear that a second guest was hearing something he hadn’t known; hadn’t wanted to know; was hearing for the first time ever in front of the world.

  How could people cut out their own hearts—or the heart of a person they used to love? And then hand it around, a little joke between commercials?

  “Reeve, I’m just material to them. I’m not a person. I’m a page in a yearbook.”

  He didn’t answer for a moment. Then, strained, he said, “That’s awful, Janie.”

  She loved the anxiety in his voice. “Oh, Reeve, I want to talk, I want to come up and visit you.”

  “That would be great. I’d love to see you. But I don’t know where you’d stay. My roommate is too disgusting for you even to meet. And it’s so crowded; every double room’s a triple this year. I don’t know any girls I could ask to take a guest.”

  “But I want to get away, Reeve, to where it’s safe and nobody knows me.”